Wilson v Tully Rinckey PLLC  2021 NY Slip Op 07341  Decided on December 23, 2021 Appellate Division, Third Department is a fairly straight-forward affirmance of Supreme Court’s denial of a CPLR 3211 motion.    Here are the simple reasons why the legal malpractice claims were not dismissed.  Plaintiff sued for employment discrimination and thought that part…

As a trial document, Outeda v Asensio  2021 NY Slip Op 51069(U) [73 Misc 3d 136(A)] Decided on November 5, 2021 Appellate Term, Second Department is a little surprising.  It’s an attorney fee trial over $ 10,000.  The decision catalogues what went wrong, some of it easily avoidable.  Read both dissents in the full version.…

A frequently recurring situation in legal malpractice cases is that plaintiff retains lawfirm in a medical malpractice case, and very shortly before the statute of limitations date, the lawfirm bows out. They quit, often because they have been unwilling or unable to fund an expert, whose review is necessary prior to filing the complaint.  Legal…

While negligent selection of experts has been rejected as a legal malpractice claim many times on the explanation that selection of experts is a strategy choice, in Moncho v Miller  2021 NY Slip Op 06960
Decided on December 14, 2021, Appellate Division, First Department determined that selection of a litigation funder can be the basis…

Rudovic v Law Off. of Timothy A. Green  2021 NY Slip Op 06873 Decided on December 8, 2021 Appellate Division, Second Department states the bedrock principles upon which a good legal malpractice is based.  How they apply to the underlying case is left to the reader’s imagination.  The Appellate Bench would aid the legal malpractice…

It is not often that a court allows reargument, states that it misapplied the law, and reverses itself as took place in Orlando v Robinson Brog Leinwand Greene  Genovese & Gluck, P.C.  2021 NY Slip Op 32235(U)
November 9, 2021  Supreme Court, New York County  Docket Number: Index No. 155048/2020  Judge: Phillip Hom. However,…

Generally speaking, fraud claims in a legal malpractice setting are dismissed as duplicitive of the legal malpractice claim.  For years, litigants have used the longer statute of limitations period for fraud as a way around a stale legal malpractice claim along with a discovery onset of the statute.  In addition, fraud allows for greater damage…

Allstar Elecs., Inc. v DeLuca  2020 NY Slip Op 07018 [188 AD3d 1121]
November 25, 2020 Appellate Division, Second Department demonstrates the danger of discovery failures.  Here, the entire case was dismissed over the failure to give what the Court termed a “failure to provide court-ordered discovery.”

“”The nature and degree of the penalty to…